# How You Gain Visceral Fat & How to Lose it | Dr. Rhonda Patrick & Dr. Andrew Huberman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOYgjncjCYw

[00:00] So, subcutaneous fat would be the kind of fat that you can just like pinch, right?
[00:03] The the fat that we see, the visceral fat, that's that deep fat that's lining your organs.
[00:10] It's often belly fat, you know, and it's lining the intestines, the liver.
[00:15] You know, it's it's it's it's It's almost like an endocrine organ.
[00:16] I mean, cuz it is secreting hormones.
[00:20] It's secreting inflammatory factors.
[00:23] It's metabolically active.
[00:25] It's constantly breaking down triglycerides.
[00:27] It's associated with double the increased risk double the risk of early death.
[00:31] Um people that have high visceral fat have 44% higher chance of having cancer, many different types of cancers.
[00:36] Wow.
[00:36] It's huge.
[00:36] It's huge.
[00:38] You know, and and and of course, insulin resistance is the number one problem with visceral fat, right?
[00:41] And I'd love to to talk about that, but um if you want, I mean, we can we can get into that.
[00:46] Yeah, it's it's so with the visceral fat and like I said, you know, visceral fat is something if you really directly want to measure it, you do a DEXA scan.
[00:53] But, you know, for the average person that isn't going to go out and do a DEXA scan, waist circumference is a proxy.
[00:59] It's
[01:01] used in a lot of studies.
[01:03] So, women that have a waist circumference of 35 in or above are considered to have a higher amount of visceral fat.
[01:09] Men that have a waist circumference of 40 in or above are considered to have higher amount of visceral fat.
[01:14] It's also that belly fat.
[01:16] Like you can you can you just know, right?
[01:19] Um interestingly, like 70% of women over the age of 50 have high visceral fat.
[01:25] 50% of men over the age of 50, too.
[01:27] You know, again, it coming down to women go through menopause.
[01:30] Estrogen plays an important role in telling the body, you know, to store the fat subcutaneously rather than viscerally deep around organs.
[01:39] And so, as women transition to perimenopause, you know, that the years before menopause and menopause, it the their estrogen goes down, and that does change the way the body stores fat.
[01:51] And any woman that's going through either of those stages knows it.
[01:53] And it's also why you see often women over the age of 50 with more belly fat, right?
[01:57] I mean, that's something that I think it's it's hard to deny.
[01:59] But, um
[02:03] it's it's one of the reasons why I kind of went back to practicing intermittent fasting because there's a there's a couple of ways that you can really powerfully lose visceral fat, and one of them is doing aerobic exercise, high-intensity interval training also really powerfully can do it, but also being in a caloric deficit.
[02:21] And I think when you start to get the combination of both, that's what really worked for me.
[02:26] It's crazy how quickly you can gain it based on your diet as well.
[02:32] So, it is different from the subcutaneous fat in many ways.
[02:35] I've mentioned it's secreting these inflammatory molecules.
[02:37] It's, you know, hormones, but it's also constantly breaking down triglycerides into free fatty acids.
[02:43] And the location of it is very dangerous because it's right surrounding the liver, right?
[02:48] It's this deep organ fat.
[02:50] And that's very close to the portal vein.
[02:52] And so, you're constantly getting this sort of mainlining free fatty acids to the liver.
[02:59] And visceral fat is very different from subcutaneous fat because it doesn't respond to insulin like subcutaneous fat.
[03:05] does.
[03:05] In other words, when you have a meal, you eat a carbohydrate meal, and you basically your body increases insulin to help take it up glucose into your liver, muscle, adipose tissue, lipolysis shuts down, right?
[03:17] So, okay, no longer am I going to break down these fats, it's time to use this energy, right?
[03:22] Visceral fat doesn't respond to insulin, so it just keeps going, right?
[03:24] And these free fatty acids, because they're going right to the liver, uh it's it's essentially antagonizing the insulin receptors.
[03:32] So, it causes insulin receptors to become more resistant to insulin.
[03:39] And this is part of why people with high visceral fat, by the way, you can gain visceral fat without gaining a pound.
[03:47] And we can talk about those studies.
[03:48] Like, people people are skinny and can have high amounts of visceral fat.
[03:54] You You've heard of like lean metabolically unhealthy but lean individuals.
[03:58] Those people exist and so you can have a high amount of visceral fat but not really look like you do.
[04:04] So when you know, obviously the insulin
[04:06] resistance is a problem for many reasons, but it also plays a role in those energy crashes that you experience, right?
[04:15] And that's kind of like some of the first signs of insulin resistance actually have to do with what you're feeling.
[04:20] So we talked about lethargy, right?
[04:23] So you know, the inflammation that's being generated from these this visceral fat constantly making these, you know, pro-inflammatory compounds are and it's an energy sink, right?
[04:32] So you do constantly feel tired, but also because your cells are becoming insulin resistant,
[04:39] when you have a high glucose meal and you're not responding, the body kind of overcompensates and produces more insulin.
[04:46] So it's like I we got to get this blood glucose out of our system, right?
[04:49] It can cause a lot of damage if it sits around there.
[04:53] And so you make more insulin and then what happens is you your blood glucose goes way low cuz it was like this overcompensation, right?
[04:58] And then you feel a crash.
[05:00] You feel like this crash and that signals to the, you know, hypothalamus part of the brain, uh I need energy, right?
[05:05] So then you you
[05:07] sort of crave you get those cravings for those calorically energetic dense foods.
[05:11] What I'm talking about is like the experience of like you know, insulin resistance and what's interesting is that you cause someone to gain visceral fat and and their brain can become insulin resistant.
[05:24] So we think a lot about insulin resistance in the muscle, liver, your brain also can become insulin resistant quite quickly actually.
[05:33] So um insulin's very important in the brain for a lot of reasons as you know, but you know, a couple of the things relative to what we're or relevant to what we're talking about would be one is it does act on the hypothalamus and help, you know, tell it to basically um stop eating, be satiated.
[05:49] Like I took a meal in, okay, like I'm going to be satiated.
[05:53] But it also plays a role in energy storage and telling the the body how to store the energy.
[05:56] And so when your brain becomes insulin resistant, it's not doing that.
[05:58] And so you're not being satiated, so you eat more, and you're storing the fat more viscerally.
[06:07] And there was a study that was published
[06:11] actually quite recently.
[06:13] I covered this in a in a recent newsletter.
[06:14] It was a really interesting study because it was healthy young men.
[06:17] and researchers put them on a little bit of a calorically dense, so it was like they were eating 1,200 to 1,500 more calories a day, and it was high saturated fat, high sugar.
[06:28] So it was a processed foods, ultra-processed foods, like, you know, ultimate, right?
[06:32] That's a lot of extra calories.
[06:33] of extra calories for 5 days.
[06:36] It is. But what happened was their they did cause their brain to become insulin resistant, and they didn't gain weight, but they gained visceral fat.
[06:45] And they started gaining fat around their liver.
[06:46] And that's something that happens as well because visceral fat is stored in liver, you're getting a lot of free fatty acids, and they're going right to the liver.
[06:51] So the liver has to store it, right?
[06:53] So you get this non-alcoholic, you know, fatty fatty liver.
[06:55] But And that happened after 5 days.
[06:57] I mean, without gaining.
[07:00] young, healthy.
[07:01] Yeah. But, you know, they were eating a lot of calories, extra calories.
[07:03] Yeah, that's like an a 1,200 That's like a half a pizza uh extra above your
[07:11] maintenance calories per day.
[07:12] They were doing.
[07:12] They were eating lots of Well, they were eating like saturated fat and refined sugar.
[07:16] Burritos and french fries.
[07:17] Yeah, I mean, obviously if you're going to do the study, you want to kind of do it to a degree where you're going to see some change, right?
[07:24] So So maybe like maybe it's not going to happen in 5 days if you're if you're only eating 500 more calories a day, but over time you will be gaining visceral fat, right?
[07:32] So it's not going to be the same degree.
[07:34] It's something to be concerned about, it's something to think about, and also because you can gain it and not really even know it, like, you know, without gaining a pound.
[07:44] And there are other things that cause it, not just, you know, eating too many calories or diet composition.
[07:47] I mean, you mentioned cortisol.
[07:49] I mean, chronic elevated cortisol makes you store the fat around around, you know, visceral fat.
[07:55] Sleep loss.
[07:55] I mean, there's also studies showing that you take healthy men, sleep deprive them for a couple of weeks, I think 4 hours they're getting 4 hours of sleep at night, they can start gaining visceral fat, I mean, pretty rapidly with only like a pound getting a pound of weight.
[08:07] So again, it's like not necessarily something that you're going to see on the scale, but it's happening.
[08:12] Right?
[08:14] And it's affecting your short-term mood, I mean, how you feel, your energy.
[08:17] It's affecting, you know, the way you're eating.
[08:19] It's a vicious cycle cuz you start to eat more calories, right?
[08:22] And then it just becomes this vicious cycle that you start to gain more visceral fat.